Translate

Monday, December 24, 2012

“And the angel said unto
them, ‘Fear not: for, behold, I bring you
good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.'” Luke 2:17

It could be
that I have gotten one every year, though I don’t think so. I opened an envelope last week containing a
beautiful card picturing three Persian wise men visiting and bringing gifts to
Holy Mary for the birth of Jesus.
“Congratulations on the birth of Jesus, the messiah and wishing you
peace and blessing this New Year!” All
of that, plus some Arabic script which I could not read, were on the front of
the card. Inside, The Islamic Education
Center had written that the Quran has only one chapter named after a woman,
Chapter 19 entitled, “Mary,” or “Maryam” in Arabic. They continue, “While Muslims don’t partake
in Christmas celebrations, we believe in the awesome and miraculous birth of Jesus,
in the miracles he performed by God’s Grace, and in the message of love and
peace Jesus brought to the world.”

None of
this was news to me. Although I consider
myself as knowing very little about Islam, despite my efforts to learn more in
recent years, I am fully aware of everything that the card told me. Still I was impressed by this very laudable
public relations effort on the part of the Islamic Education Center. In a day when many Christians seem to be
nearly hysterical about a supposed War on Christmas, and very eager to make
distinctions between true Christianity and other faiths that seem to be competing with or antagonistic to Jesus, here is a group of Muslims
obviously articulating some common ground they share with us. Before you discount their card or deem me
naïve for thinking that it was a lovely gesture (or think that I don’t realize
that Muslim evangelism is just as self-serving as Christian evangelism, no more
and no less so), take the message at face value. Jesus, it says, is not the property of
Christians only. Jesus is for the world.

And that, I
do believe, is in the Bible. “For behold
I bring you good tidings of great joy which shall be to all people.” It’s a bit odd,
don’t you think, that a popular distillation of the Good News of Jesus Christ
is that he died on the cross to save you from your sins, and that all of the
benefits of his precious death are yours provided that you accept him as your
personal savior. I have nothing to say
against any of that, except that like most distillations of the complex, it
leaves a great deal to be desired. But
the thing so odd about it is that the accent falls so clearly on what you and I
as individuals do with Jesus. There is
little notion that Jesus is the universal savior, let alone the cosmic Christ,
reigning from before time and to the ages of ages. The “personal” Jesus crowds all that
out. It is odd only because, for most of
Christian history, up to and including the modern period, Jesus was seen to be
the Savior of the world, not just the savior of a subset of individuals in the
world. To the extent that it doesn’t
seem odd to us, we bear witness to just how pervasive the “personal Jesus” is.

Rather than
get on the defensive about Jesus and about how much I know he loves you and me
because we adore him and follow him, I am in the mood tonight to
celebrate. Maybe you are too, because I
doubt that you came to church on Christmas Eve wanting to do high-test
theology. What better a thing to
celebrate than the truth that this birth, this messianic arrival, is something
so unimaginably grand that we could not conceivably cheapen it by imagining
that we somehow own it. It makes no more
sense to try to own Jesus than it makes sense to claim that we own the sun or
the moon or the stars. The salvation
which was for all people, born that day in the City of David, was not then, is
not now, nor ever shall be a parochial event meant only for the initiated or the
qualified. For, long before Jesus was
born, God spoke through the prophet Isaiah, saying about the people of Israel,
“It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes
of Jacob and to restore the survivors of Israel; I will give you as a light to
the nations, that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.” [Isaiah
49:6] A light to the nations! That is what Israel was created for and
re-created for! And that is what, through Jesus, Israel became: a means through which God’s salvation might
reach to the ends of the earth.

Afghan young woman

No one
would have supposed that night in Bethlehem that the birth of this child would
be of cosmic significance, or even of much interest. In Luke’s story, Mary had known even before
conception that the baby she would bear would be holy, Son of God Most High;
that he would be great; that he would rule from the throne of his ancestor
David a kingdom that would have no end.
Well, Luke may have understood the meaning of those words, but you may
be sure that his character, the little virgin of Nazareth, had no idea what the
angel Gabriel meant when he spoke them to her.
And certainly a bunch of shepherds in the middle of the night had no
earthly idea of what the heavenly host meant by singing “Glory to God in the
highest” or what these good tidings of great joy might mean to all people. But this is just the point, in a way. The way the salvation of Christ gets to be
for the entire world—to all people, and even to all things animate and inanimate
in the universe—is that little by little, beginning in Bethlehem, people tell
each other about what has happened. Just
like those shepherds who (some say) started broadcasting what they had seen and
heard, people tell each other the news about this special birth, and about
their own birth to a new life through him.
A story begins to develop, and a community begins to tell it as its
own. Jesus calls people—at first a few
fisher folk, then a few more—and first news you know, he has a community
gathered around him, including women. He
dies and is raised from the dead and within a few years, not only women and
Jews, but Gentiles and foreigners, Ethiopians and Greeks, slaves and freedmen,
rich and poor, intellectuals and illiterate people, city dwellers and country
folk, are a part something bigger even than a community, a movement in
fact. So the good news first told to the
shepherds gets to be truly good tidings of great joy for all people.

... in all cultures and faiths

Imagine
what would happen if instead of trying to possess Jesus in stained glass and on
dashboards, Christians on a huge scale determined to look for Jesus in all the
unlikely places and people. Imagine what
might happen if we began to see Jesus not only in the Quran but also, as the
Church Fathers did, in the Hebrew scriptures.
Suppose we made the leap, if we haven’t already, from seeing Jesus as a
particular baby lying in a particular manger in a particular story, and began
to see his footprints all over creation, his spirit in stories of gods and
heroes of other faiths and cultures, his beauty in the music and art that knows
nothing of the historical Jesus as such, his truth in patterns of living that
express his teachings even unawares. You
will recognize, of course, that none of this is particularly radical, because
Christian missionaries at their best have been doing all these things for
centuries. They have been recognizing
the reality of Jesus implicit in cultures and beliefs that have not known
him. They have named Christ when they
have seen him appear in places that have had no name for him, much as Paul did
in the Book of Acts when encountering a shrine on the Athenian acropolis
inscribed “To an Unknown God.” Suppose
our job were simply to make Christ known by acknowledging that in many cases he
is already known if not named, present if not worshiped and obeyed to the ends
of the earth.

God is not
about to lose the universe, not to evil, not to ignorance, and not to
hate. God is Truth, and that Truth will
outlast the most stubborn and virulent of its opponents. God does not need armies, either political or
rhetorical, to defend God’s cause. But
God does need Marys who will say, “Be it unto me according to your word.” God does need Josephs who will make the long
trek from wherever they are to Bethlehem.
God does need shepherds, apparently, who are minding their own business
but who have time to behold the heavens opened and a stunning intrusion of
glory into an ordinary night of watching.
God seems to rejoice and applaud when people get up and go searching for
the thing they have been told has happened that will bring unutterable joy to
the world. And God, who by definition
should need nothing, needs a community of people who will adopt as their own
the ways of the Christ who continually sees enemies as those to be loved and
who says of potential competitors, “if they are not against us, they are for
us.”

So, Good
Christian friends, rejoice, with heart and soul and voice. The Good News that Christ is for the world is better than anything we could
have imagined. All people have tasted or
can taste the Bread of his life and the Wine of his joy. And it won’t stop until all the ends of the
earth have seen the salvation of our God.

Monday, December 17, 2012

Somebody goes into a darkened room where a
single spotlight illuminates a canvas.
Some paint being nearby, the person picks up a brush, dabs in color, and
starts to apply it to the canvas.
Suddenly the lights come on in the room and the person is horrified to
see that his impromptu little project has messed up a masterpiece, only a small
corner of which had been illuminated.
That image, from J. B. Phillips, the great Bible scholar and preacher of
the last century, has become my standard way of understanding what happens when
the lights come on and the truth is revealed.
The word for that in the biblical vocabulary is judgment. It is a word that,
generally speaking, we hate. Only unless
and until we find ourselves in a predicament—plaintiff in a lawsuit, for
example—looking for judgment in our favor,
pleading for an act of justice that will set wrong to right, do we like the
idea of judgment. Otherwise we equate it
with sentencing or condemnation, and few people like the idea of being
sentenced or condemned.

Friday
morning the lights came on in a place I know well: Newtown, Connecticut. You now know the name of that town, and you
are not likely to forget it. It will now
quite likely become a reference point in a thesaurus of places and dates, ranking
alongside or even above Columbine, Laramie, Oklahoma City as the cite of an
atrocity past all comprehension, too horrible for words. I lived in Newtown, Connecticut during a
formative period in my life. For
thirteen years I was Rector of Trinity Parish, which sits atop Church Hill,
squared off in front of the Newtown Meeting House, the famous flagpole in the
middle of the street between the two of them.
In this idyllic town I often say I grew up. My two daughters did in fact. One of them played soccer sometimes on the
field at Sandy Hook Elementary School, now a place of unspeakable emotional
wreckage. Newtown is still a major place
in my psychic landscape, as my soul still wanders in my dreams among the stores
and houses there, revisits the events that punctuated my life there, touches
the spirits of friends I still cherish there.

The shadow
side of Newtown has long been the fact that people expect life to be ideal in
such a place, and are always somehow puzzled that horrors happen and tragedies
strike, shattering the peace and quiet of the town. Of course, the ideal is an illusion; for the
forces that devastate Littleton and Denver and Portland and New York City and
Washington, DC are lurking insidiously in the crannies and caverns of the hearts
of Newtowners just as they do everywhere.
Perhaps that has something to do with the heaviness of my own heart
today. I know how awful it is to find
that evil and chaos have been unleashed in one’s own Eden, wrecking the heart
of creation, and taking grief to depths unfathomable.

Yet still
the lights come on. And this time they
come on for the nation as well as for Newtown.
The vulnerability of even the “best” communities, model neighborhoods,
exemplary school systems: exposed. The inadequacy of accessing our mental health
system: exposed. The bitter fruits of a violence-soaked
culture: exposed. The cowardice of politicians: exposed.
The insistence of people that the right to own a gun supersedes the
right to be safe from one: exposed.

I Responding to
Judgment

Let’s look
first at how we respond to judgment and what happens when the day comes in
whose awful light all these things and more are exposed. That is exactly what today’s gospel
confronts. John the Forerunner appears
in the desert of Judea proclaiming nothing short of judgment. Notice, however, that, though he predicts a
wrath that is coming, his is in fact not a message of doom. Rather, his is a call to repentance. “Produce fruit, fruit worthy of repentance,”
is hardly a sentence or a condemnation.
John’s counsel is utterly practical.
Don’t start making excuses, he warns.
Trees need to produce good fruit, and so do people. The effect of John’s preaching is to turn on
the lights. His purpose is to prepare
the Way of the Lord by inspiring change of heart and life on a massive
scale.

Note that
the crowds are not full of questions about what the awful wrath is going to be
like. Actually they have only one
question, which they ask insistently:
“What shall we do?” That rings
true. People all over the country today
are asking, “What are we going to do to change all this violence?” And we are off to the races. We already know what the debate is going to
look like. Some will argue for more and
better gun control. Some will argue that
that is no answer at all. Some will
vilify the opponents of gun control and make them out to be demonic. Others will swear that President Obama
arranged the whole thing as a pretext for taking away the guns from those who
have a right to bear whatever arms they want to. And on and on and on. Taking a cue from John the Baptist, we can
conclude that there really are some things we can do to respond to this judgment,
this exposure of the truth, and they are not all that hard to figure out. Share your tunics and your food, collect
nothing under false pretenses, be content with wages and don’t resort to
extortion and blackmail: these were the
simple answers that John gave a crowd anxious to know what to do. Renew the ban on assault weapons; make it impossible to sell guns, even in
private shows, without a license; set safety standards for all guns the way we
set safety standards for dolls and teddy bears; make the mental health care
system accessible not only for those who seek it but, for example, to parents
of mentally disturbed adults whose behavior may well be presage violence. Listing these things is easy. Accomplishing them is not necessarily so. Yet these are some of the things we can do to
respond to the awful cloud of judgment that erupted in Newtown and now rains
down upon us all.

II Practicing Repentance

But,
second, let’s get down to the hard stuff:
practicing repentance. John
preached repentance. That does not mean
getting down on your knees and saying you’re sorry. Repentance means changing one’s heart, mind,
and direction. Ronald Heifetz in his
book Leadership Without Easy Answers distinguishes
between a technical fix and adaptive change.
The challenge for this society is that we frequently opt for a technical
fix when what is required is a systemic change.
There are sometimes when a technical fix is exactly what is needed, as
when you have a broken bone and it needs to be set. But in the case of the violence now so
thoroughly exposed to be the danger and the evil that it is, more is
needed. A change of attitude, a change
of heart, a complete shift in cultural attitudes would be true repentance. And it can be done. We have done it before. Take, for example, the matter of
smoking. Plenty of people still do
it. But about 1970, American society
began to take a turn towards a systemic change in the way we approached
cigarette smoking in particular. We
could scarcely have imagined then that the day would come when in major cities
cigarette smoking would be banned in public buildings, restaurants, and
countless venues. The tobacco industry
was a powerful lobby. But that did not
stop a gradual, persistent process that led to enormous social change.

The problem
with gun violence and the rest of the cluster of things exposed so gruesomely
in Newtown is that a great many people want to prescribe or proscribe what
others do rather than to look critically at ourselves. Unlike cigarette smoking, the culture of
violence, which nurtures acts of carnage, is far more insidious. Not only is it linked to war (how many times
do we unleash American firepower to do in places like Iraq and Afghanistan like
horrors to what Adam Lanza did in Sandy Hook?), but also to sex role stereotyping
(we support guns for little boys to play with and glorify as heroes males who
commit violent acts), to the entertainment industry where cartoons, video
games, and movies glorify violence and demonstrate how to perpetrate it. Do we want to change? The axe is laid to the root of the trees, and
we have felt its gash. What more do we
need? Terror and horror are not going to
disappear from our lives unless and until we create a culture that will sustain
and support peace as a viable way of life.

III Deepening Community

But there
is a third thing we might think about today, and that is the way of deepening
community. See yourself for a minute
standing among the brood of vipers that John the Baptist thundered at on the
Jordan riverbank. Israel of John’s day
was hardly a unified community. They
were a factious bunch. Pharisees
practiced a strict interpretation of the Torah, the Law, built on deep
commitments faithfully to keep the Covenant that they understood firmly to be
God’s will. Sadducees were another
group, if anything more conservative than the Pharisees, less willing to
embrace new interpretations of old scriptures and practices. Zealots were those who were convinced that
violent revolution was the only plausible option towards running the Romans out
of town. And just a stone’s throw from
where John was doing his baptizing, the Essenes were a monastic community
busily composing what we now call The Dead Sea Scrolls, awaiting the appearance
of a new order inaugurated by God.
Soldiers, tax collectors, and ordinary Jews, not to mention foreigners
and Gentiles here and there rounded out the society, contentious and
fragmented. It is not easy to undo or
redo that kind of social reality.

Yet in
forming a community initially by calling disciples and teaching them the basics
of living and praying together, Jesus threw in his lot with a new community
under the rule of a single commandment, to “love one another as I have loved
you.” That is what the Church needs to
be doing all the time: being a community
that models how to be inclusive, how to live with differences, how to be in
communion despite disagreements, how to put common endeavor above individual
achievement, how to pray together, how to make safe spaces where people do not
have to hide their identities nor tell lies in order to survive, how to
confront one another in love, how to confess and be wrong, how to confess and
be reconciled. These things are the
staples of our life together. Our country
and the world need us to share them. It
would be wonderful if everyone without a faith community were to find one, but
that is not going to happen. The
question before us now is how to tell our story convincingly and helpfully to
people who need to hear a word of hope and to see how living justly and
peaceably actually works.

The very
same heart of mine that is broken over the Newtown tragedy is a heart that
found peace and healing in Newtown time and again when people taught me some
basic lessons of Christian community.
Some of my hardest moments in ministry included times I sat on the lawn
and listened as teenagers grieved the death of classmates in automobile
accidents; when I stood at the altar and celebrated a eucharist for a woman
brutally murdered; when I wept in the sacristy after a particularly painful
annual meeting. It is in such places as
those that we practice and thus learn to sort out the wheat from the chaff, the
things that last from the things that ultimately fail us, the wonderful way in
which Christ Jesus baptizes us with the Spirit of a holy consolation and at the
same fires us to get up and do something to help the nation and the world heal.

Monday, December 03, 2012

“I
understand you have had a death in your family.
May I be of help?” I asked over the telephone.

“Pastor, I
don’t know where to turn. My aunt
died. She had no money, left no
money. I have what the District of
Columbia allows for a funeral, which is just enough to cover cremation. She didn’t have a church. I don’t have one. I want to give her a little service. I was talking to this woman I work with and
she said, “You know, St. Stephen’s buried my nephew years ago. Maybe they would work with you.”

I told her
that we could certainly arrange to have a funeral for her aunt. She was audibly moved. We agreed on a meeting time the following
week when we would plan the details of the service.

On the
morning we met, I took her into the chapel and showed her where the simple
service would take place. She couldn’t
thank me enough. “You know, there is a
congregation that worships here,” I said.
“But they don’t own this place.
We’re here as much for you as for anybody. As far as we are concerned, if you step
across the threshold of this place, or even make a contact, you’re as much a
part of this place with as much claim on us as if you were here all the
time. So we’re glad to do this for you,
and you don’t owe us a cent. I’m happy
I’m here. I’m happy you’re here.”

Her aunt
turned out to be not her aunt at all, but someone she had taken into her home
because the woman literally had no place else to go to get out of the stark and
shadowy place where she lived. The
aunt’s ashes would be ready in a day or two.
She would pick them up and call me so I could meet her at the
church. She didn’t call. One, two, three days went by. It was the holiday weekend and I thought it
strange, but didn’t think much about it, figuring that we had time enough
before the day of the service.

On Sunday
night I picked up a message. The voice
was that of the woman’s sister, telling me that her sister had died—“passed”
was the word she used—the preceding Friday.
Her grandson had found her. Maybe
a heart attack. They didn’t know. But we’d go forward with the aunt’s funeral
on Tuesday. I was stunned, but scarcely
as much as they.

Five people
showed up for the aunt’s funeral: the sister, her husband, two friends, and
I. I read the gospel and began talking
about it. Intuition told me that they
needed to talk more than I. So the
homily became a conversation. I
acknowledged that they must have been soaked more in grief at the sudden loss
of Jane than by the death of the aunt.
And so ensued a rather open airing of the kind of grief that settles at
the bottom of the heart’s dark basement.
“We five people have never been together, and we may never be together
again,” I said. “But here we are. We are a community. That is what we have to do. That is what God enables us to do. We have to form communities however and
whenever we can. We have to connect with
whomever we can connect with. We bear
each other’s burdens, and share each other’s joys, and today is a day of
burdens. That is what the community of
Jesus does. Because that is what he
does.”

II

You might
have noticed that there is an ongoing debate in American society about the
primacy of the individual versus the primacy of community. There has been for generations now a doctrine
of “Rugged Individualism,” classically articulated by Herbert Hoover in the
peroration of his presidential campaign of 1928. If you were to read it today with the author
and date blocked out, you would swear that it was written in this last
presidential campaign, so persistent are the arguments supporting the rugged
individualist point of view. But there
is another strain in American society, that of communal solidarity. Most of us have encountered that current, or
been a part of it. Our ancestors got
together on the frontier and raised barns for each other. We can point to compacts, conferences,
colleges, consortiums, consociations, and constitutions as implements of
community. Although some of us may argue
vigorously that we are on our own, the truth is that we are creatures of
community. We are primates, after all;
and like our primate cousins we are made to live together. One can be a rugged individual, but only for
so long. Sooner or later the rugged individual
must come to terms with community, or die.

So on this
First Sunday of Advent, I am following my custom of the last four or five
years. Today begins a year in which I
plan to preach perhaps some eighteen sermons.
Through them all I will be looking at the scriptures through the lens of
community. In a way, that is hardly
novel, because all of the scriptures were written by, for, and to a community
of faith. I think, however, that we will
hear them differently if we approach them with an ear for what they say to us
as a people rather than just to me and you and you as individuals. My sense is that we most often come to church
thinking of ourselves as individuals with our own particular set of needs and
concerns, with our ears pricked up for something that will speak to us and help
us on our individual paths. That is not
a bad thing, and it is probably inevitable, given the way we tend to think
about ourselves. But what might happen
if we tune ourselves again and again to see how through everything and in many
different ways, God is building community through us?

Look at the
snippet from Jeremiah that we read today, for example. “‘The days are coming,’ says the Lord, ‘when
I will fulfill the promise I made to the House of Israel and to the House of
Judah. …I will cause a righteous Branch
to spring up for David; and he shall execute justice and righteousness in the
land.’” God makes promises to a
community. That is because God deals
with communities. Individuals may be
called, sent, given tasks to do, supported and confirmed as individuals, but it
is always within the community, be it nation or religious community. The oldest story that we have about community
is the story of the Exodus, the story of the deliverance of a community from
slavery into freedom. It is against the
backdrop of that story that everything else is written and read. So, for example, when we read “In the
beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” we are reading and hearing
the words that describe the God that the communal audience knows as their Great
Liberator. And when we read the first
story in the Bible that belongs to what we can call “history,” it is the story
of Abraham. God calls Abraham in order
to create through him a community. The
way the Bible is put together, that call comes precisely because the experiment
with Noah to save civilization had bombed badly. God settled in for the long haul, determined
to work out the human story through creating a community. Sometimes that community would fail badly to
get even the most basic ideas right.
Occasionally someone would come along who would be able to bring the
community into line. The Righteous
Branch of David, whom we know as Jesus, would be one such person, one whom we
can look at and say, “He is our Lord, he is our righteousness, because through
him we are strangely made right with the deepest truth of who we are—we do, in
fact, get right with God.”

Move over
to the gospel and listen to it. “Jesus
said, ‘There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the
earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the
waves. People will faint from fear and
of foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens
will be shaken.’” The interesting thing
about this is not that you can run to today’s newspaper and read articles that
will make you think this passage is coming true before your very eyes. It has been coming true for more than two
thousand years. No, the interesting
thing is that by the time Luke wrote them down, Jesus’ words, “Truly I tell
you, this generation will not pass away until all [these] things have taken
place,” was in fact out-of-date. That
generation had passed, and still the Church was waiting for their redemption,
the Second Coming of the Son of Man. So
what made them relevant? Why were they
preserved? They were preserved because
the world was in fact still falling apart, just as it is now, and in the middle
of it was a community that not only needed hope but was itself the source of
hope. And I suppose, if the kingdom of
God is near when Jesus’ generation, or Luke’s, or ours sees the world flying
apart at the seams, then that kingdom is near at this very moment. We should know. The fig tree is in full leaf, so to say.

III

The message
is not to assorted individuals who may be motivated to hear it and internalize
it. It is a proclamation to a community
on whom, quite literally, the world depends.
The community must be on guard, not lolling around dissipated and drunk
on this, that, and the other distraction, weighed down with worries about,
among other things, how to keep itself afloat financially and how to protect
itself politically, or how to take its power and manipulate the rest of the
world with it. The community needs to be
alert, praying that it may have strength to weather the storms, and to stand
before the Son of Man.” That community
is yours and mine. And if we do not know
how, we need to learn how to practice that kind of watchfulness, that quality
of prayer, that sort of centeredness, no matter what is going on in the world
around us.

And we need
to show the world how to be a community, how to make community, how to practice
living in community. Not only that, but
we need to be conversant enough with the things that destroy community, like
insidious conflict and squabbling over leadership, like power plays and
disrespect for the vulnerable, to combat them effectively. It’s imperative, too, that we faithfully
practice self-examination and repentance regularly enough to be able to
recognize when we ourselves begin destroying community, and disavow our
behavior that does that. And we need to
be generous enough to recognize that hosts of people want not to be hassled but
to be embraced, need a shoulder or two to lean on, and sometimes just need a
community when they have to bury their dead, or when they get scared to death
as they see signs and portents that their lives and their world are coming
undone.

Frank Gasque Dunn

About Me

I am a spiritual guide (a “soul friend”), offering coaching, counseling, and support to individuals and organizations. I founded and am Executive Director of Jonathan’s Circle, a non-profit organization enabling men to realize wholeness connecting sex and spirit. Read more at thesoulinyou.com.
I was for twelve years Senior Priest of St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church, Washington, DC. Prior to that I led parishes in North Carolina, Connecticut, and Virginia.

Welcome to The Book of Common Moments

On this blog I reflect on common moments. Some of those reflections are sermons and other things I have shaped for oral communication. Some are more precise reflections on incidents in mine and others' lives. Some are poems, short stories, essays. I invite you to join in the dialogue.

All our stories amount to an infinite number of variations on a handful of great themes. Becoming conscious of our stories is perhaps the biggest adaptive challenge for human beings. When we begin to know what stories we are telling and living, we stand a better chance of choosing those stories that are true.

Do not believe it because someone said it, or because it is in a book, or because you read it on the internet, or because that is what you were taught in school, church, temple, or Boy Scouts. Believe it only when you have tested it in your own life and find that you can affirm it in the deepest part of your soul.

Destiny

Your soul knows the geography or your destiny. Your soul alone has the map of your future, therefore you can trust this indirect, oblique side of yourself. If you do, it will take you where you need to go, but more important it will teach you a kindness of rhythm in your journey.